Guns of the Dawn (24 page)

‘Set down!’ the master sergeant called, and the exhausted recruits let their burdens fall. Some, testing their luck, sat down on the grass or on the crates, and when the master
sergeant made no comment, they all did, finding a dryish patch where they could take the weight off their aching feet.

‘Someone get me an officer,’ the master sergeant called out and, when nobody moved, she singled a man out. ‘You, baboon, go get me an officer, or you’re on a
charge.’

In this case, the military overruled the masculine, and the chastened soldier pushed off through his fellows, whom the master sergeant rounded on sternly. ‘As for the rest of you, if this
is your war effort I’m amazed Denland isn’t in the capital by now. Haven’t you got something better to be doing with your time than drooling?’

Some of the male ensigns and sergeants began to round their charges up and move them on, to cooking, to cleaning, to sentry duty. There was a fair crowd still goggling at the women when the
colonel arrived.

He was close to Lord Deerling’s age, she judged, but shorter and broader, with a small moustache and beard seemingly tacked to a round face. His hair was little more than a white fringe
above his ears, giving him the look of everyone’s favourite uncle. His uniform was well decorated, though, with mementos of the Hellic wars, and the soldiers instantly made way for him,
lining up to see what he would do.

He surveyed the newcomers, and Emily thought she detected in his eyes a certain weariness at it all. He had been given an unwanted gift, however much needed. Like Master Sergeant Bowler at
Gravenfield, he did not know what to do with a company of women soldiers.

‘Master Sergeant,’ he called, ‘before you return to Locke, do me the favour of sending them to join their companies.’

‘Sir? I was informed that they would remain under their own officers,’ the master sergeant replied.

‘No, no, no. We have three understrength companies here already. There’s no sense shipping in another one that’s all comprised of women, by God. No, we’ll sort out the
divisions later, then. Where’s Captain Mallarkey?’

A clean-shaven man not much younger than the colonel made himself known.

‘Get them billets, Captain. Get their gear stowed. Then get everyone lined up first thing tomorrow morning. I need to have a word. And, in the interim, give every officer the word that
I’ll have no unsoldierly business, despite this . . . this. And make it understood.’

They had their tents allotted them, while men hefted the burdens they had carried so far. They were allowed to put down the packs that had travelled with them from all the way
up the rail track, and before that from their homes. Outside, the sky was a deepening blue, resolving itself to black in the east. There were no sunsets in the Levant. The sun swept behind the
monolithic cliffs to light that other war that was being fought up there, in the canyons and the valleys and the great open wastes of the plateaus. The nights were sudden here, in the Levant, and
the sunrises drawn-out and bloody.

Emily fell onto her bunk and slept, without dreaming, for as long as she was able, worn ragged from the long march. None of the training, the sedate trots around the Gravenfield grounds, had
prepared them for this. Soldiering was too much to teach anyone from scratch in forty days, and none of them had taken it seriously enough.

The next morning, she opened her eyes to light as scarlet as her jacket, summoned from her chill and clammy bed by the sound of a horn. Without ever quite waking up, she found
herself lined up with all the other soldiers, men to the left, women to the right. She looked across the faces of the existing garrison, hoping to catch sight of Tubal, but she recognized none of
them, all pale strangers. Many were wounded, she saw. There were bandaged heads and arms in slings, scars and livid pockmarks she would soon know to be the work of the local insects. These men
looked solid, resolute, unhappy. She wondered what her company looked like to them.

Women, of course.

The colonel came out of the shack from which he commanded the war effort. He looked no happier with his new charges in the light of dawn than he had the evening before.

He stood for a moment, looking left and then right with a grim expression. Two captains flanked him: the older Mallarkey and a younger man with his long face made lopsided by a jagged scar.

‘All right, you’ve heard the news,’ the colonel said. ‘And now you’ve seen it for yourselves. Women, in the army.’ He shook his head. ‘You all know. We
need the extra guns. If we’re to drive the Denlanders from this place, we need the manpower. Even if it’s woman-power.’ He stopped a moment, and Emily wondered how well he had
thought his speech through.

‘This is going to work,’ he declared. ‘Now, I have never fought alongside a woman before. My orders are that these women are properly trained and ready to fight.’ His
little runs of words each came out quite separately, like prophecies on slips of paper drawn by a fortune-teller. He thought quite a lot between them. ‘That is the situation. You will all
accept it. They will obey your officers’ orders. You will obey
their
officers’ orders. A sergeant is a sergeant. I don’t care about the man or the woman of it. Any
insubordination will be treated just like insubordination. It’s no excuse.’ He glowered hawkishly at the lot of them.

‘Now, the other thing you must remember is that this is the army of Lascanne. The army of the King. We are civilized. Decent people. Not like those animals from Denland. We have rules.
Now, I know a lot of you will have thought about this, having heard the news. Women in the camp and all. Quite un-military. Let me tell you, there will be no fraternizing.’ He paused to
consider the word. ‘No involvement between the men and the women of my army. None. If any of it comes to my attention, there will be severe punishments for all involved.’ He paused to
glare at the men and the women equally. ‘You are here to fight, not anything else. It takes away from the war effort, yes?’

There were black looks amongst the men then, frustration and disappointment. Some of the women, too, Emily noted. She wondered just how enforceable the colonel’s demands would be.

‘Finally, and this is the most serious part,’ the colonel continued, ‘if I hear of a man forcing himself on one of these women, on any woman, then it will be treated as the
worst court-martial offence, and one I’ll have the fellow shot for, believe me. This must be understood. It will be seen as an assault on a fellow soldier, as well as an attack upon the
King’s own writ. I will not have any of it in my army. From this point on, these women are not women. They are soldiers. They will be treated as such. Any man who steps across that line runs
the risk of a firing squad. It will not be tolerated. Is that clear? Well, is it?’

After a moment’s caught-out pause there was a harried ‘Yes, sir’ from the ranks of the men.

‘Right, then,’ said the colonel, seeming mollified. ‘If that is understood, then we may as well use what has been given us. Give them badges. Put them into companies, Mallarkey
Then I want five squads from Stag Rampant ready for a sweep, day after tomorrow. We need to blood them, Captain. We need to blood them.’

Ensigns passed down the ranks of women with sullen looks or smiles or just blank faces, depending on their nature. To each waiting pair of hands they gave a cloth badge, some
stained, and most with loose stitching where they had been cut from other uniforms. Emily turned hers over to look at the device upon it: a black stag on its hind legs, antlers cocked back,
forelimbs pawing the air. A Stag Rampant.

Elise came to find her, to show her an identical badge, and they sat together that morning, sewing the patches onto their jacket shoulders, whilst all around them hundreds of women did
likewise.

‘I thought we’d never get here,’ Elise said. ‘All that slogging yesterday, I thought my shoulder was going to fall off.’

‘It was a long way.’

‘
You
can say that? You were on the light shift,
Ensign.
’

‘A long way from home,’ Emily clarified. ‘From Grammaine.’

‘Oh, well, maybe.’ Elise shrugged. ‘I’ve not really done the “home” business for a long time. Gravenfield was the nearest I got to it for years. I reckon the
army’s a home now. A career. Maybe I’ll even stay on after the war’s done. I’ll be at least a sergeant by then, I reckon. Got to be. And you’ll be a major-general or
something.’

Emily tried to imagine leaving this place, the war a finished thing; going home and hanging up the musket. Never again having to march or shoot or take orders. Her mind would not stretch to it.
The road to the Levant was like sliding into a pit that was too steep to crawl back from.

Above them, the flag of the Stag Rampant company snapped in the light breeze. They would spend that first day simply discovering the layout of the camp, and the next meeting their new company,
under the dubious looks of the male soldiers that were now comrades-in-arms.

The day after that, they would enter the swamps for the first time, and Elise and seven other women would not return. After that, Emily had to assume, they were well and truly blooded.

She came back to herself, slumped upon the ground just beyond the swamp, with the sprawling jumble of the camp in sight. There were others around her, she noticed. While most of
the company were staggering on towards the tents, others had come out into the light and air, and just dropped: breathing freely and seeing clearly was suddenly all too much. One woman shook
violently, retching. There was a deeper red staining the sleeve of her jacket.

And, of course, some had not re-emerged at all. Some were still there, with the waters their final resting place.

Elise.

There was a numbing, gnawing hole within her. Emily hunched over it, fingers digging in through her shirt. She would tear it out, if she could, both the horror and the guilt. If she had only
been faster; if she had only stood a yard either side; if only, if only, if only . . .
Oh, Elise, this can’t have happened.
Not so soon. Not so very soon, a mere handful of days
after arriving here. Not after forty hard days at Gravenfield and eight sweet ones at Grammaine.

Master Sergeant Mallen helped the injured girl up, caught her as she stumbled, and then led her away. One or two of the others had managed to lurch to their feet and were treading slowly into
the camp, but Emily could not make herself move.

There was a hole in her mind, and it was where the face of the dead Denlander would have been, could she but remember it. She was profoundly glad she could not. Two deaths on her conscience, and
the guilt was real – friend or foe.
I was never made for this.
Too late to discover that now.

She was still clutching her musket in the crook of her arm. Now she let it fall, stared at it: a lump of machined metal, the tool of her trade. She hated it. She wanted to smash it against a
rock, and watch its jagged pieces spin madly away. She wanted to make it so that it killed nobody ever again. But it was hers,
her
musket. She was a soldier now.

‘Ensign.’ She looked up to see Mallen standing there.

‘I’m sorry, Master Sergeant . . .’ Emily started to rise but he put a hand out to stay her, and then dropped cross-legged onto the ground beside her. He was a strange man,
Mallen: lean and hard. His thin face hosted two frighteningly intense eyes set within a tableau of abstract, irregular tattoos that blurred and smudged the natural outlines of his cheeks and
forehead. His hair was long, but nobody ever told him to cut it, and there was something fierce and feral about him. He wore his uniform like a straitjacket. This was not a civilized man: when she
had first set eyes on him, she had felt frightened of what he might be capable of. Now she had found out what she herself was capable of and he sat before her and began stripping off his jacket,
with its insignia, as if to say that rank was being put aside for now.

‘How goes it, Ensign?’ he asked her, and she could not answer him. She was ashamed of losing Elise, ashamed of feeling pain for the Denlander she had killed. She was a poor
soldier.

‘Get someone?’

She nodded, avoiding his eyes.

‘A lot of them can’t, first time.’ His voice was soft, surprisingly well-spoken. ‘Thank God for it. Means we’ve still something worth fighting for. The day they
send us a conscript company who can put a shot into a man without thinking, that’s the day I quit. But everyone has to learn how, and better sooner than later. How do you feel?’

‘Sir?’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Bad, sir.’

Without warning he reached out and pinched her chin, tugging her head around to look at him.

‘That’s right, you should,’ he told her. ‘Every time, understand?’

She nodded wordlessly.

‘But we have to do it, understand? To protect Lascanne.’

Another nod. He clapped her solidly on the shoulder, one soldier to another, and she burst out, ‘Elise. Elise is . . . she was . . .’ Then the words would not come. If she tried to
say them again, she would weep, and she would not be seen weeping before the master sergeant of Stag Rampant company.

Mallen studied her with the same intensity he turned on everything, and then stood up and backed off a pace. ‘It’s war, Ensign. A fool’s excuse for killing, but it’s a fool’s world. Makes fools of all of us. Come on now, Ensign, set a good example.’

He put a hand out for her, and she took it, feeling the strength of him as he pulled her to her feet.

‘What happened, Master Sergeant?’ she said.

‘We surprised them.’

‘
We
surprised
them?
’

He glanced off towards the swamps. ‘They were trying to get two hands of squads up the Dareline Channel, when they ran into our sweep. We turned them back. They won’t try it on for a
few days, at least, but there were more of them than us, that’s all. Twice as many as we had, so we sent them away but they bit us bad as they went. Jungle war, Ensign. No clear
winners.’